Terrorism Loses Humanity Winshttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2015/01/terrorism_loses_2.php
Years ago I told myself not to worry about a devil... that it's all in my mind. Then I realized that's the worst place it could possibly be.

I don't think there's an external devil stalking the planet for men's souls, but I do believe there's a point of consciousness in all of us -- whether we call it shadow, dark side, devil, or whatever -- that is not a beautiful thing. When this aspect is allowed to drive our thoughts and behavior -- whether as an individual or as a group -- it isn't just neurotic. It is beastly.

We can pretend all we want to that this doesn't exist. We can insist that reason, civilized behavior, international law, and civic institutions have the upper hand; we can be grateful for the fact that any group psychosis is over there somewhere and surely can't affect our daily lives. We can believe those things, but more and more now we know they aren't true. Today, the beast is stalking the planet and it's way too close to the barricades.

Yet how do we fight a collective psychosis, spreading like cancer and beginning to attack the major organs of our civilization? Whether it's ISIS in the Middle East, lone crazy people taking up the cause, foreign fighters or domestic jihadists... the question on everyone's mind is, what do we do now?

Americans are very good with a to-do list. Just tell us what to do, and our national character is such that we can usually do it. We can liken the Nazis as well as the Japanese Imperial Army during WW2 to operable tumors that were brilliantly and surgically removed by Allied forces. But today's terrorist threat is not an operable tumor; it's more like a cancer that's already metastasized. It is wrapped around and hiding behind vital organs, constantly multiplying its hideous malformations. Invasive measures and surgical removal are not enough to handle this one. We're going to have to boost our immune system ... we need to deal with cause and not just effects ... and it would be a very good idea to pray for a miracle.

A holistic model of healing does not just apply to a physical body; it applies to a social body as well. Right now, our primary mode of fighting terrorism is allopathic, focused on suppressing and eradicating external symptoms. Clearly those symptoms are deadly, and the most powerful allopathic treatment is called for.

But the holistic paradigm emphasizes mind and spirit as healing modalities too. Internal powers should not be seen as the weaker step-sister of brute force. In fact, at this point the use of brute force in fighting terrorism is doing as much to create enemies we don't have yet as to kill the ones we do. No one knows this better than those who are applying the brute force, yet we're caught in the inescapable bind of having to apply it nevertheless.

So what are the internal powers that need to be identified? How do we harness them? What strategies best put them to use?

In seeking to answer these questions, we're confronted by challenges more difficult than you might imagine. On an external level, our problems involve politics, police, and military. On an internal level, our problems are no less difficult -- not because they're complicated, so much as because they challenge the very notion of what it means to be a civilized society in the 21st Century. We need to ask deeper questions than, "What should we do?" We need to ask, "Who should we be?" And even more importantly, "Who should we be to each other?

A rally of 2 million people on the streets of Paris is a beautiful show of solidarity, ultimately even more so if it becomes a template for how we live our lives each day. We need to join as brothers and sisters now, not just as a reaction to tragedies, but as a way of preventing tragedies. Every decent man, woman and child at that rally in Paris felt like they belonged to something, felt they were part of something, felt they were standing for something meaningful that day... and that is the answer. What could be a more horrific irony than that jihadists say they feel a sense of community? Only one thing is more powerful than a brotherhood based on hate, and that is a brotherhood based on love.

Humanity needs to understand this: it won't be enough to only express our love for each other after a horrific event has occurred. We are challenged to change the very bones of our civilization -- to shift from an economic to a humanitarian model -- if we're to even come close to diminishing the presence and decreasing the rise of monsters in our midst.

That is the only way we will adequately counter not just acts of terror, but even more importantly the radical, hate-filled philosophy that inspires them. As any expert will tell you, there is no way to track down and stop everyone who has ever been radicalized by a hateful cleric. A dark consciousness is the root of the problem, and our biggest difficulty in addressing it is our refusal to give consciousness any credence at all. That is why a purely materialist perspective is inadequate to the task of formulating an effective strategy to combat terrorism. We will not create an effective way to win this contest until we are willing to acknowledge the ground on which it's being played. And to play back on that level.

When it comes to terrorism -- and when it comes to defeating it -- feelings do matter, clerics do matter, and philosophy does matter. This battle is being waged on deep subconscious levels. The force now tapping into the darkest corners of the human psyche will only be defeated from the most light-filled corners of the human heart. Terrorism is hatred turned into a political force, and the only thing powerful enough to fundamentally override it is to turn love into a political force. But that, we will not be able to do until we are willing to make love more important than money, and others more important than ourselves.

First let's look at money, and then let's look at us.

Money runs politics in America today, which means financial interests determine the allocation of resources to everything from military to education to humanitarian expenditures. On a geo-political level this is devastating in its effects, at home and abroad, because it leaves untended such dangerously high levels of human despair. Large groups of desperate people anywhere in the world should be considered a national security risk, because desperate people are far more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces. Until America deals with the fundamental issue of the corporate takeover of the U.S. government, there is no reason to think that the driving force in our foreign policy will ever be a true desire for peace. When our leaders talk about protecting "America's vital national interests" around the world, they're more likely to mean protection of Halliburton, Shell, Monsanto and Exxon, than protection of the the 17,000 children who starve each day, or the billion human beings on the planet who live on less than $1.25 a day. There is so much unnecessary desperation, poverty, alienation, and hopelessness that the Western world has allowed to fester, and so many points of hypocrisy in our own international actions for which we owe atonement and amends. At this point, America's problem is not just that some people hate us; it's that a lot of people who don't actually hate us, don't like us either. Those who don't actually hate us have become more and more easy to radicalize by people who genuinely do.

Actually, though, the problem today is not radicalism but a lack of radicalism. We lack the radicalism of love. By this I mean the deliberate, intentional, spiritual, transcendent, devoted, courageous, committed, proactive love of people who have awakened to the absolute necessity - if we are to survive as a species -- of seeing every hungry child in the world as a child we must feed; each transgression against the earth as a limiting of our grandchildren's chances to survive on the planet; every uneducated child as a security risk; and every thought or action of love as a contribution to the field of energy that alone has the power to drive the monstrous scourge of terrorism back to the nothingness from whence it came.

Some people seem more willing to die than to change their minds, and that is the question before us today: are we really willing to die rather than evolve beyond the obsolete, unsustainable principles that currently organize our civilization? This is the revolution now to be waged: a revolution of consciousness, as we change our thoughts and thus our behavior and thus our institutions and thus our voting patterns and thus our government and thus find in time that we have changed ourselves.

Any conversation less radical than that simply plays into the hands of those who despise us. Terrorism is a manifestation of the accumulated moments when humanity has chosen not to love; but we still have the opportunity to choose again. We have the power to override the heinous efforts of those who terrorize, to overrule them and nullify their malevolence. First, however, we have to override our resistance to doing so. We must overrule our ego-based reticence about surrendering to love and making our lives its instrument. That is the contest which matters the most. Are we willing to rally to that cause, not just one day in Paris, but to the best of our ability every hour of every day of every year, not only when it's easy but also when it's difficult? Any moment when we don't, is an inch of ground we cede to the terrorists. Any moment when we do, is a moment when we gain the upper hand, turn on the light that casts out darkness, and do the work of transforming our civilization into the sustainable, beautiful, and wondrous thing it is meant to be.

]]>mwblog2015-01-14T11:23:33-08:00OUR DEMOCRACY IS DYINGhttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/12/our_democracy_i.php
In case anybody hasn't noticed, democracy in America is dying now. This isn't an overstatement; it's a fact. Corporate interests dominate our politics so much at this point that our government, for all intents and purposes, is merely its handmaiden. Whatever Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets. Corporatism is the new order of the day. One political party stands for it; the other political party won't stand against it.

The word inertia means the tendency of an object to move in whatever direction its been moving until and unless there's the introduction of a counterforce, and the Democratic Party is simply not providing the necessary counterforce to the corporatist agenda so exalted by the Republicans. Such a possibility is undermined by Democrats with corporatist agendas of their own. Watch them trying to sideline Elizabeth Warren as I write this. It's all gotten so terribly predictable.

Some people are pussyfooting around the word, but others are realizing it's time to say it: we need a peaceful revolution in America. In the words of President John F. Kennedy, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." The American people have simply got to stand up now. This isn't the time for any of us to go mute - whether it's those who feel there's no point in saying anything, or those who feel there's too big a risk in saying anything. And you know who you are.

The social revolution we need is comprised of two major categories: What we say No to, and what we say Yes to. In the American Revolution, with the Declaration of Independence we said no to what we would no longer accept (living under British rule). In ratifying the Constitution, we said yes to what we would do instead (form our own system of government). The template was genius then, and it's genius now. Today, we need to say no to a situation in which our government is bought and paid for, and yes to a return to democracy. Nothing short of an historic, nothing namby-pamby-about-it, serious social movement will take us out of our free fall and set America back on the track to real liberty. Today, lobbyists - not the people - are in control. And that is not freedom.

The situation has shaken out - and thank you, Senators McConnell and Reid for adding to the disaster of Citizens United by upping the amount people can contribute to political parties; that really helps (not) - in such a way that nothing short of a Constitutional Amendment will stop the big money flowing into our political campaigns like poison into the veins of our democracy. The best bet now -- given the resistance within both major parties to seriously taking down the dastardly "For Sale" sign posted on the front yard of our government -- is for the people ourselves to call for a Constitutional Convention, state by state. And that's what has started to happen.

If something inside you says, "That's true," then I hope you get active. We're in serious straits now and things won't get better by themselves. In denial about this? Go stand over there. Too cynical to think we can change things? Go stand over there. Too sedated to be upset yet? Go stand over there. An apologist for the system? Go stand over there. Ready to kick ass? Go to http://www.wolf-pac.com/ and express yourself big time. Work with that organization, or with any other you like. But this isn't a time to sit on the sidelines. Our democracy is sick - it is really, really sick -- and all of us are needed now to nourish it and make it well.

]]>mwblog2014-12-14T11:10:43-08:00WHEN WISDOM IS THE SOURCE OF OUR POWERhttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/08/when_wisdom_is.php
I heard ISIL described earlier today as "an international association of sadists." Whether one chooses to go that far or not, we clearly have a problem on our hands.

America is endangered, however, not just because there is a powerful, armed enemy arrayed against us; we are endangered also because our spiritual defenses are weak. Spiritually, we are unarmed. We need a "mantle of protection" that we do not now have.

America has undoubtedly been blessed, yet we have taken that blessing for granted in a way that has diminished its power. The blessing upon us was not due to some special dispensation from God, but to the fact that we claimed for ourselves the role of blessing unto the world. We set out to be a blessing, and as with all cause and effect, it was the blessing we were to others that magnetized so much blessing to us.

Over time, however, we have become much more concerned with enjoying our blessings than with adding to their storehouse. We have chosen the ways of war over the ways of peace, the ways of mean-spiritedness over the ways of compassion, the ways of separation over the ways of unity so many times, with such an accumulation of hard-hearted, mercenary policies, as to dim the light that so illumined our past.

We need now, more than anything, to shore up our blessings by once again assuming for ourselves the role God has assigned to all people and all nations: that we be the change, that we demonstrate love, that we not be selfish, that we be the keepers of His kingdom rather than hoarders within our own. We cannot ultimately protect our worldly kingdom unless we tend to God's.

Some would argue that this would make us weak, that we cannot afford to put our defenses down. But spiritual defenselessness does not necessarily mean a lack of material defense. Indeed at this point, with elements such as ISIL active in the world today, questions as to what constitutes a just war are both relevant and appropriate. Still, no matter what we do -- how much war we fight, or even how successful we are at it -- until we come to understand the metaphysics of war and peace, we will doom not only ourselves, but also our children, to war without end. This will satisfy no one but those who make their fortunes upon it.

Whether we are sending guns or we are sending prayers, as a nation we must surround ourselves with a spiritual dome to stave off the arrows of hatred now coming our way. America needs enlightenment, not necessarily as a path to pacifism but as a path to power.

America has a lot of work to do, to reclaim the mantle of mercy and protection that has previously been as a light around us. We need that light, or we will not prevail. God has not shone upon us because we're somehow special; He has shone upon us because we have shone. And now, we must atone for the dimming of our light. We need to atone for past mistakes - from slavery to wars of aggression; we need to admit our character defects - from racism to militarism; and we need to open our hearts to the poor among us - from immigrants to our own children. Only when we once again embrace a true vision of brotherhood, justice and democracy - not just in word, but in vibrant and vigorous deed - will we replenish our storehouse of blessings so needed now.

At times such as these, understanding the powers of the spirit is as important as understanding the powers of the world. The meek shall inherit the earth because, in the end, they are smarter.

A tale from Buddhist mythology speaks to the power of the spirit in matters of war:

"Mara, the evil one, had arrayed a huge army to defeat Siddhartha. But according to Sarthavaha, one of Siddhartha's chroniclers, "Mere numbers do not make the strength of an army...If wisdom is the source of his power, a single hero can defeat countless soldiers.

He continued speaking to Siddhartha's enemies, "You think he is mad because he meditates; you think he is craven because he is calm. It is you who are madmen, it is you who are cowards. You do not know his power; because of his great wisdom he will defeat you all. Were your numbers as infinite as the grains of sand on the banks of the Ganges, you would not disturb a single hair of his head. And you believe you can kill him! Oh, turn back! Do not try to harm him; bow before him in reverence. His reign has come...."

But Mara, the Evil One, vowed to defeat the hero. And before attacking him, he sought to frighten him. Mara's army was a fearful sight. It bristled with pikes, with arrows and with swords; many carried enormous battle-axes and heavy clubs. Then the Evil One even summoned the rains. They fell with great violence, submerging cities and scarring the surface of the earth, but the hero never moved; not a single thread of his robe was wet.

Mara roused against him the fury of the winds. Fierce gales rushed toward him from the horizon, uprooting trees, devastating villages, shaking mountains, but the hero never moved; not a single fold of his robe was disturbed.

The Evil One made blazing rocks and hurled them at the hero. They sped through the air but changed when they came near the tree, and fell, not as rocks, but flowers.

Mara then commanded his army to loose their arrows at his enemy, but the arrows, also, turned into flowers. The army rushed at the hero, but the light he diffused acted as a shield to protect him; swords were shivered, battle-axes were dented by it, and whenever a weapon fell to the ground, it, too, at once changed into a flower.

Suddenly, filled with terror at the sight of these prodigies, the soldiers of the Evil One fled.

Mara wrung his hands in anguish, and he cried:

"What have I done that this man should defeat me? For they are not a few, those whose desires I have granted! I have often been kind and generous! Those cowards who are fleeing could bear witness to that."

The troops that were still within hearing answered:

"Yes, you have been kind and generous. We will bear witness to that."

"And he, what proof has he given of his generosity?" continued Mara. "What sacrifices has he made? Who will bear witness to his kindness?"

Whereupon a voice came out of the earth, and it said:

"I will bear witness to his generosity."

Mara was struck dumb with astonishment. The voice continued:

"Yes, I, the Earth, I, the mother of all beings, will bear witness to his generosity. A hundred times, a thousand times, in the course of his previous existences, his hands, his eyes, his head, his whole body have been at the service of others. And in the course of this existence, which will be the last, he will destroy old age, sickness and death. As he excels you in strength, Mara, even so does he surpass you in generosity."

And the Evil One saw a woman of great beauty emerge from the earth, up to her waist. She bowed before the hero, and clasping her hands, she said: "O most holy of men, I bear witness to your generosity."

Then she disappeared.

And Mara, the Evil One, wept because he had been defeated.""*

So whether or not barbarians truly are at the gate -- and no matter what we do about it -- we must become an enlightened nation, or the problem that has now become all too familiar will remain with us and grow. The problem itself emerged from our minds; make no mistake about it, our misadventures contributed to the creation of the monstrous situation that we have on our hands. And it is in our minds as well - through the correction of our thinking and the purification of our hearts -- that the problem will ultimately be solved. In the short term, it might be solved by armies. In the long term, it will only be solved by love.

* The Life of Buddha, by A. Ferdinand Herold, tr. by Paul C. Blum [1922]

]]>mwblog2014-08-25T06:54:34-08:00On ISILhttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/08/on_isil.php
We went to war when and where we should not have gone to war. We sent military equipment to a part of the world where we should never have sent it (although, with a military industrial complex getting over 600 billion of our tax payer dollars every year, they had to send it somewhere...and then of course to our domestic police forces after the older equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan was replaced by newer models).

Now, in an ironic, tragic twist of karma, much of that equipment is in the hands of a true military enemy -- not a trumped up one. ISIL is the richest, most well equipped terrorist force in the world -- and they are genuinely brutal. They are anywhere between 5,000 and 15,000 people. With hundreds of millions of dollars in their hands (they have taken over banks, oil refineries and more), they have a capacity to do a lot...and a lot of what they want to do -- and are doing -- is truly, deeply, inhumanely dark. Right now, at this hour, they are spreading terror to hundreds and thousands of people through public executions, ritualistic stoning, beheadings, even crucifixions.They have their sights not just on Syria or Iraq, but beyond..to Europe, and even the United States.

None of us can afford to pretend this isn't happening. There is and will continue to be plenty of conversation about what to do about ISIL militarily, but right now let's do what we can holistically. Every day, for at least five to ten minutes, let's use the power of prayer and visualization to lift them above the pathology that drives them. We need to do this on a massive scale. Use the power of your mind, your religion, your spirituality, your meditations and your prayers to spiritually quarantine and heal these people, to call their souls back to sanity and love.

How ironic that we are war weary from fighting in so much war we should not have been fighting. Now, we have a real problem on our hands. Now, we need a miracle.

]]>mwblog2014-08-21T07:53:32-08:00Race and Repentance in Americahttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/08/race_and_repent.php
What is happening today in Ferguson, MO, had it roots hundreds of years ago, and nothing less than pulling out those roots will heal the situation today. America needs to reconcile with our racial history -- seeking genuine atonement and making meaningful amends. Until such time, tortured race relations will continue to plague us with more and more tragic results.

It's interesting that we even use the phrase "race relations," given how little we register that this is even about a relationship. The relationship between blacks and whites as groups in America is psychologically and emotionally dysfunctional, to say the least, and until this is dealt with on the level of the cause and not just effects, we will continue to play out over and over again the cycle of violence at its core.

It's difficult to deal emotionally with the history of slavery in America, which is why many whites have chosen not to. Yet it's imperative that we do, because until we see clearly the line of development leading from slavery to the Civil War to the Ku Klux Klan to the Civil Rights movement to "benign neglect" to the "prison-industrial complex," America will continue to misunderstand the real problem. This is not just about how many bullets were shot into Michael Brown. The shots that matter most here are way, way too many to count.

Slavery existed in slave owning states in America beginning in the 1600's, increased significantly with the expansion of the cotton industry in the early 1800's and did not end until the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. When finally freed, the slave population in America at that time was somewhere around four million.

But the legacy of the Civil War did not end at Appomattox. The stroke of a Presidential signature on the Emancipation Proclamation, even an Amendment to the Constitution, could end the evil of an external institution but not the pathology that produced it. External remedies do not of themselves address internal causes. Slavery ended but the racism that gave rise to it did not, only burrowing more deeply into the fabric of Southern society after the Civil War.

During the Reconstruction Era from 1865 to 1877, with federal troops stationed throughout their states, a vanquished South had to come to terms with the fact that they had lost the war. With Lincoln's assassination, gone was the voice proclaiming "malice towards none, and charity for all." Bitterness over having had to go through what they went through to win the war was the main emotional tone of the North, and the humiliation of defeat was the main emotional tone of the South.

With their painful defeat came the eradication of the South's primary economic engine, all social and political privilege, and an entire way of life. In addition, carpetbaggers descended from the North to loot, manipulate, and take whatever advantage possible of an already devastated population. Had Lincoln lived, things might have gone very differently. But he did not.

Many in the South, not surprisingly, then turned their rage at having lost the war against the people whom they saw as its cause. The last thing certain Southerners were ready to do was concede true equality of social status to blacks. And thus began an era of white supremacy in the American South, which was almost as ugly as slavery itself.

If slavery marked Phase 1 of America's black-white relationship, then the reign of white supremacy after the Civil War marked Phase 2.

Former slave owners had not necessarily awakened to the deep humanity of African-Americans; they simply could no longer own them. Their sense of entitlement and the violence it spawned simply morphed into new forms. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, founded in the 1860's, began a wave of terror in which lynching - hangings carried out by angry mobs -- of black Americans as well as of whites seeking to help them became common. Once federal troops were withdrawn from the Southern states in l877 and White Supremacists regained control of Southern State legislatures, blacks were routinely intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting in state and federal elections. Violence around elections became normal, with lynching reaching a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the period between 1890 and1908, southern legislatures passed new constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites. They enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to enforce second-class status against blacks.

The horrors of institutionalized white supremacy were ultimately met and repudiated by the rise of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement during the 1960's. Their struggle, of course, was not easy, and Dr. King received both professionally and personally the full force of supremacist rage. From the lynching of integration rights workers, to police brutality, to church bombings, and ultimately the murder of Dr. King, the white supremacist movement did not go down quietly. Love is the only force that is powerful enough to overcome hate, and Dr. King displayed that love with the full force of his being. His non-violent message struck the heart of a nation, ultimately awakening America to the need for federal civil rights legislation. And it came to pass.

A cursory reading of history might lead one to think, "So then it was all handled, right?" But unfortunately the answer is no. The monster of racism clearly has many heads, and every time one has been bitten off, another one has arisen. The hot violence of slavery was replaced by the burrowing violence of white supremacy, which was then replaced by the cold violence of benign neglect.

Thus began Phase 3 of our tortured race relationship. "Benign neglect" is a phrase first articulated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan when he was Urban Affairs Advisor to President Richard Nixon, arguing that the drama of the Civil Rights movement should be followed by a period of more or less quiet in the relationship between blacks and whites. It was not necessarily a proactively racist sentiment on Moynihan's part, or even on Nixon's. But it was an abandonment of a healing process nevertheless, and in that sense at least a passive betrayal of the relationship. To say to a formerly enslaved population, "Be glad! You're not slaves anymore, and you're not going to be routinely lynched or kept from voting!" - while good, indeed very good - was still not restitution. And nothing short of restitution will constitute a real amends and redeem the soul of America. It wasn't enough that slaves in America were freed. The question remains, what were they freed to?

Civil rights legislation, with its signature Voting Rights Act, was extremely important in integrating African-Americans into the voting pool. But of itself it did little to integrate African-Americans into America's economy. And people who are left out economically are left out, period. The era of race relations post-Civil Rights movement has paralleled the advancement of American society in general, in which a relatively small part of our population - blacks, as well as whites -- has done very well, while the majority has hardly moved forward at all. "Blacks go to Harvard; blacks get rich; see, a black man became President!" is now the mantra used to justify a continuation of a policy of benign neglect. The fact that geniuses can make it in America doesn't of itself mean that social justice exists in America. Not everyone is a genius, but everyone should matter.

Yes, it is true - and very much to be celebrated - that blacks have opportunities in America today unheard of fifty years ago; but that of itself does not constitute full economic justice. The poor in America are all benignly neglected now. As long as 1 per cent of our people control 40 per cent of our wealth and 60 per cent of our people live on 2.3 per cent of our wealth, economic justice for the majority of Americans of any color isn't even on the short list of our national priorities.

One in five American children live in poverty today, making us the second highest child poverty rate in the advanced world. Among black children, however, the poverty rate hovers at 40 per cent. A black male has a one in three lifetime probability of incarceration in the United States, lending credence to Michelle Alexander's description of America's "cradle to prison pipeline." These problems are not discreet and newly formed; they are the continuation, the legacies, of a situation that began in the 1600's and still plagues us today. It's not as though the situation finally erupted into violence on the streets of Ferguson. The situation erupts into violence in the hearts of black mothers and fathers all over America every day, as they teach their children - particularly their sons - how to behave in order to avoid the unequal application of criminal justice in America. For America has fallen into a terrible pattern in the area of race, as in so many others: don't heal the disease, just suppress or seek to eradicate the systems. The message communicated by most governmental action is this: "Don't keep blacks down, necessarily - just don't lift them up. The geniuses among them will make their way. If and when they complain or act out, we have police and prisons to show 'em who's boss."

Yet heal the disease we must. And the most significant healing of any societal woe emerges from justice done. Blacks in America have been trained to ask for so little, as though God knows, we've done enough. We've done enough, white America...? What, in the name of God, have we done? We spend millions on anti-poverty programs and billions on prisons. In fact, we haven't even apologized. It's much easier for someone to forgive you when you've had the courtesy to apologize, and much easier for them to get over it if you've had the decency to fix the problem.

We need to apologize, and we need to make genuine amends. America needs to pay long overdue war reparations, and until we do, we will not move forward in any meaningful way. America needs more than forgiveness; we need genuine repentance, and restitution for our national sins.

In the 1990's, Bill Clinton suggested we have a "national conversation about race," suggesting perhaps that if we talk about it enough then maybe the problem will go away. But it's difficult to have an authentic conversation when half of the people involved in the dialogue have over two hundred years of understandable rage to express. There are situations in life - and race in America is one of them - where talk without action does not heal a wound, but only exacerbates it. Whites and blacks have a relationship in America, but it is an unequal one. One side owes something to the other, and until the debt is paid, the relationship will remain unhealed. The very mention of actually paying something back to people we enslaved for two hundred fifty years is still not on the table, not really. And until it is, then America will not be free.

America spends over 600 billion dollars a year on defense. Over a trillion dollars has been spent on the Iraq War, seen now to have been the biggest foreign policy blunder in America's history. Yet no one ever asked if we "could afford it." So it should not be considered unreasonable to suggest that America put 500 billion dollars towards a Reparations Plan For African Americans. Not piecemeal things, like Affirmative Action. But the real deal -- in a big way -- with the emotional, economic and social magnitude it deserves. Incremental changes often add up to no fundamental change at all.

Reparations are not a radical idea; they're considered a basic tenet of social and political policy throughout the world. Why should America not pay reparations to the descendants of slaves who were brought to America against their will, used as slaves to build the Southern economy into a huge economic force, and then freed into a culture of further violence perpetrated against them? It's not as though all that's over now; if anything, the problem has grown within the cells and psyches of every generation since. America will continue to waste money on relatively limited fixes, until we buck up and pay this debt in a real way once and for all. Millions are indeed wasted if the billions we owe here are not paid. A Reparations Plan would provide a massive investment in educational and economic opportunities for African Americans -- rendered as payment for a long overdue debt. Until that debt is paid, the cycle of violence that began in the 1600s and continues to this day will continue to haunt our psyche and disrupt our social good. It is time for America to atone for our past in both word and deed, and to heal our weary soul.

Marianne Williamson is a best-selling author and lecturer. www.marianne.com

]]>mwblog2014-08-18T20:01:29-08:00An Open Letter to Hillary Clintonhttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/07/an_open_letter.php
Hi, Hillary. You know me. I mean, we're not friends, exactly, but we're acquaintances. You were wonderful to me back in l994 when you invited me to the White House. It's a memory I will treasure always, and you gave it to me. I thank you.

Now, about your presidential run -- if indeed you make it. I'm writing you this letter because I think the topic might figure into your decision-making, or maybe not.

I admit that in 2008 I went with Obama, feeling at the time that he was carrying the real spirit of things, yada, yada, yada. Yeah, well. Anyway.

That was then and this is now.

I want a woman president -- really, I do. A lot of us do. And yes, you're so qualified, and yes, we've known you forever, and yes, you'd know what to do from Day 1. We all get that.

But none of that is enough to get my vote, or the vote of a lot of people I know. We only want to vote for you if you run like hell away from that corporate box you've landed in. I'm telling you, Hillary. The American people have become hip to what's happening. We know now that Wall Street runs the country, and we don't like it. And for many of us, we don't want to vote for you if Wall Street runs you too.

There are the seeds of political revolution in the air -- a rebelliousness, a rambunctiousness -- that America has been sorely missing. It's faint, at least on the left, but it is there. As a matter of fact, as tragic as it is for a lifelong Democrat to have to admit this, the one place where we have been seeing it manifest recently is on the political right. The Tea Party, sans a codependent relationship with the Republican Party, is causing a real problem for establishment Republicans. And once progressives break free of their codependent relationship with the corporate Democrats, you're going to have a real problem on your hands too.

That's why I'm writing. I have a feeling you're getting most of your advice from people who think that everything I'm saying here is nonsense. So I'll say it as loudly as I can.

STOP NOW. Stop cozying up to the banks, to the chemical companies, to the military-industrial complex, to the party machine, and to all the various financiers who make up the plutocracy now ruining this country. Yeah, I know a lot of them are nice people and that's cool. But they should not be able to turn the elected representatives of the American people into mere inconveniences they can buy off election after election. And if we have a sense that you'd be just another puppet of the elite, then I don't believe that you will win. We were fooled once, but I don't think we're going to be fooled again.

In the final analysis, we really do love democracy -- and watching it dismantled as it's being dismantled, and corrupted like it's being corrupted, has taken a lot of us from denial to real depression to a collective "Hell, no!" that will have electoral consequences in 2016.

Years ago, George Lakoff compared Republicans to a critical father and Democrats to a nurturing mother. I pointed out a bit later that the critical father had become an abusive one -- but that as anyone with any psychotherapeutic understanding knows, the child will ultimately put a lot of his or her blame on the mother who stood by and allowed the abuse to happen! That's the Democratic Party machine today, Hillary. Please don't be one of them.

I know you know exactly what I'm saying, because I remember you -- a lot of us remember you -- when you were raging against the Establishment machine on top of which you're now so sweetly perched. That machine is not our salvation; it's our problem. Corporate Democrats might have gained some power for the party, but at the cost of its soul.

I'd love to clamor for you, to work for you, to cheer you on. I don't want to sit on the sidelines longing for Elizabeth or Bernie. I want to hear what's true from you. I want you to rail against the chemical companies and their GMO's -- not support them. I want you to decry the military industrial complex -- not assure them you're their girl. I want you to support reinstating Glass-Steagall -- not just wink at Wall Street while sipping its champagne. In short, I want you to name the real problems so we can trust you'd provide some real solutions.

But maybe that's just me wanting you to change, to be someone different than who you are. If that's true, please forgive my presumption and ignore this letter. But if anything I'm saying rings any kind of true at all, then I hope you'll start saying so.

And quickly please, Hillary. People are starting to despair.

]]>mwblog2014-07-21T17:27:46-08:00THE CENTRAL AMERICAN CHILDREN: A Refugee Crisis, Not an Immigration Crisishttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/07/the_honduran_ch_1.php
It is totally without conscience to knowingly send young children into places where they are likely to be tortured and/or killed unless they agree to sell drugs and commit murder, and stand a good chance of being tortured and killed even if they do. Yet social policy without conscience is what both Republicans and the President are proposing when they advocate the elimination of laws already on the books that would give the worst case Honduran and El Salvadorian children asylum.

"Speedy removal" is the term used the other day by our Director of Homeland Security in discussing one third of the expenditure for President Obama's 3.7 billion dollar proposed plan to deal with the crisis of those children. What a chillingly cold term for deporting people who have nowhere to go. Knowingly sending children back to places rampant with evil is to conspire with evil.

Immigration laws are important, and only those seeking asylum on legitimate grounds should receive it. But in this case, due processes by which asylum would be established for those genuinely in need are being circumvented. This is nothing but child abuse on a massive scale. Many people talk today as though "protecting our borders" is some sort of sacred responsibility, while protecting children is some tawdry inconvenience for which we bear no moral responsibility.

On July 13th's "Meet the Press," Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-TX, argued that many of the children should be presented with the chance to make the case for asylum. "These folks need to be given the case to go to court and argue their case," Castro said. He said that deporting children who are escaping the violent conditions in their countries like Honduras and El Salvador is not "the humane thing to do."

In the words of President Kennedy, "America cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor." And our spiritual poverty these days is staggering. Turning those children away is an immoral as turning away boatloads of Jews trying to escape Hitler's Germany. We did that, but at least there's a general consensus that we should not have. How is sending these children back to the most violent places in Honduras any different?

God does not love Americans more than he loves anyone else. He didn't give Americans some divine right to health and safety, and leave everyone else to just care for him or herself. Even if we were to believe such a distorted version of God's love, then how, please tell me, are those Honduran children supposed to take care of themselves? It seems to me that they tried their best, simply getting here. If God helps those who help themselves, then perhaps He is asking us now to aid Him in His efforts.

]]>mwblog2014-07-13T07:34:38-08:00THE REVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESShttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/07/the_revolution.php
There is a revolution occurring in the world today, but it is not fought with armies and it does not aim to kill. It is a revolution of consciousness.

This revolution is to the 21st Century what the Scientific Revolution was to the 20th. The Scientific Revolution revealed objective, discernible laws of external phenomena and applied those laws to the material world. The Consciousness Revolution reveals objective, discernible laws of internal phenomena and applies them to the world as well.

The Scientific Revolution improved the state of humanity in many ways, but it also fostered a worldview neither ultimately helpful nor deeply humane. That worldview is mechanistic and rationalistic, without the slightest bow to the primacy of consciousness. Yet consciousness supplies moral vision and ethical purpose, without which all the science in the world won't keep us from destroying ourselves or the planet on which we live.

Gone with irony and deep sigh any lingering hope that science will cure all the ills of the world. Certainly science has improved and continues to improve the world in significant, even stunning ways. But despite all its amazing gifts, science cannot give us what we most need now. It cannot save us from ourselves. Science can lead to the cure of a physical ailment, but it is not just a physical ailment that needs healing. Humanity's core problem is not material but spiritual. It is our insanity -- our inhumanity towards each other -- from which we need to be delivered, in order to save us from the self-destruction on which we seem so bent.

Science is carried out at the behest of human purposes. It can be used for good and it can be used for evil. Of itself, it is neutral and thus amoral. It should not therefore be our god. It's time to end our strict obeisance to its dictate that the laws of the material world are fixed and unalterable, unchanged by the powers of consciousness. The old Newtonian model of world as machine has in fact given way to the realization that the universe is not a big machine, so much as it is, in the words of British physicist James Jeans, "a big thought." Science itself has begun to recognize the power of the mind, but not so a lot of the world it has mesmerized over the last hundred years.

We need to heal our thinking, in order to heal our world.

The Law of Cause and Effect holds true on every level of reality. Thought is the level of cause and material manifestation is the level of effect. Change only on the level of effect is not fundamental change it at all, yet change on the level of cause changes everything. That is why a revolution in consciousness is our greatest hope for the future of the world.

What is the Revolution of Consciousness, in a nutshell? Like all great movements in human history, it is based on a single insight: in this case, that we are not separate from one another. We are not material beings limited to the physical body, but beings of consciousness limited by nothing. Like waves in the ocean or sunbeams to the sun, there is actually nowhere where one of us stops and another one starts. On the level of bodies, we're all separate of course. But on the level of consciousness, we are one.

What that means, of course, is that what I do to you, I do to myself. That makes the Golden Rule very, very good advice. Do unto others what you would have others do unto you - because they will, or someone else will.

Anything we do to anyone else will ultimately come back at us, whether as individuals or as nations. Once we know that, we cannot un-know it. It changes everything, including our hearts. How can we not change how we see each other, once we realize that we are each other?

In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly." That understanding is not metaphor or symbol; it's a description of an ultimate reality shoved from our awareness by scientific materialism. To reclaim that understanding is not blind but visionary. King was not just a movement leader but also a spiritual one, proclaiming that the human condition would not fundamentally change until our hearts were changed. Until that change occurs within us, every time we cut off the head of a monster three more will take its place.

In the words of President John F. Kennedy, "Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable." The Revolution of Consciousness paves the way for the peaceful evolution of the human race. The alternative to that evolution is catastrophic and impenetrable darkness.

Any species, if its behavior becomes maladaptive for its survival, either mutates or goes extinct. What arrogance it would be to believe that that applies to every species but our own. In fact, humanity's behavior is maladaptive for our own survival: we fight too much with too many weapons of mass destruction existing on the planet, and are actively destroying our own habitat. Our choice is clear: we will either mutate or we will die.

The mind does not want to hear this, but the heart rejoices in it. The dictates of science aren't so sure about it, but the dictates of consciousness are clear. Humanity doesn't need to make another machine; it needs to make another choice. We need to consider the possibility of another way, another option, another path for the human race to follow...one in which we do not bow before the laws of science, but rather bow before the laws of love. The mind will no longer be our master, but our servant. Science will no longer be a false god, but a truer help. And humanity will evolve.

The earth will heal, peace at last will come to earth, and war will be no more.

]]>mwblog2014-07-10T17:56:17-08:00We Have It In Our Power To Begin The World Over Againhttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/07/we_have_it_in_o.php
Advocating for American independence, Thomas Paine wrote, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

And indeed, on July 4, 1776, that's exactly what our Founders did. By signing the Declaration of Independence, they established a break from England and gave birth to a new nation.

Cataloging King George's many and horrific abuses, the Founders did what they felt they had to do in order to secure their own rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Only a total and complete break from England would give them the opportunity to do that.

Throwing off the yoke of what had become a tyrannous rule, 56 brave men risked death for themselves and terrible retribution upon the colonies should their endeavor fail. They knew the violence they were calling down upon themselves, once King George's army arrived to crush their rebellion. They knew there was no guarantee that their effort would succeed. Yet they were willing to take that risk, in order to establish the right of Americans to govern our own lives...not only then, but forever.

Today, we too often take our rights for granted. And a right that is taken for granted, too easily becomes a right that is taken away.

July 4 should be a day of mindful, not mindless celebration. It's a day to look back at what was courageously created in the past, in order to claim the courage to create a more powerful future. America is still, despite our weaknesses, the container for the most powerful idea on earth: that all things are possible, that the future does not have to be like the past, and we all have the right to live as we wish to live.

John Adams, the second President of the United States, said he hoped our national birthday would be a day when Americans of every generation revisited America's first principles -reminding ourselves and our children why freedom matters.

As a recent Congressional candidate, I was reminded every day during my campaign how fortunate we are to live in a country where I could say whatever I wanted to say about our government, point out whatever I felt needed to be pointed out, and no one had the right to stop me. Read any newspaper story today and you're reminded of all the places in the world where such honest reflection is not allowed, not possible, or even punishable by death.

So today, on July 4, let's celebrate with more than a bar-b-que. Let's celebrate with deep and humble gratitude for the extraordinary gift that was given us on this day 238 years ago. Obviously, the Founders didn't create a perfect system. But they began the process, in an amazing way. It's now ours - as the stewards of democracy in our own generation - to continue to carry the process forward. To make it better, as best we can.

]]>mwblog2014-07-04T11:11:55-08:00Bearing Witnesshttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/06/bearing_witness_2.php
It's not very often that I see something on a corporate-owned American TV news channel and go, "Wow guys, that was great." But tonight I did. CNN deserves a huge bravo - and a huge thank you - for their special SIXTIES episode about the war in Vietnam.

When the show first started, I could tell within 60 seconds that I wanted to turn it off -- this was going to be really hard to watch. Giving in to my emotional resistance, I thought, "I don't need to watch...I know what happened...I remember it from when it was going on." But I knew I couldn't turn off the TV and feel clean. It was like watching "Schindler's List"; it's not like you wanted to see it, so much as it was your moral responsibility to see it. You can't just let others go through the suffering and not even show enough respect to bear witness. According to Gandhi, bearing witness to the agony of others is itself a soul force.

So I watched the show tonight. And yes, it was painful. But I thought, thank God that someone in the media decided to put war -- real war, the truth about war, the suffering of war, and the stupidity of some wars - on prime time TV right now. We need to see it. We're so vulnerable to the propaganda of our multi-billion dollar war machine these days that it's very easy to either acquiesce, or simply look away.

Earlier today, I asked a woman, "So what do you think about this Iraq situation?" To which she replied, "Oh, I try not to watch the bad news."

"Do you think that will make the bad news go away?" I asked her.
"No," she said, "but it will help me sleep at night."

My thought, unspoken of course, was that perhaps she needed a sleepless night or two. We're living at a time when if you're not grieving, you must not be looking. But also it's a time when if you're not recognizing our power to change things, you're not realizing the power that lies within us. As they said in the 60's, if you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem. And if you never look at the problem, then it never occurs to you to be part of the solution.

A young man recently said to me about my boomer generation that we were "just a bunch of hippies." He said, "Drugs, sex, and rock and roll. That's all you guys were about."

To which I responded with a chuckle, "Uh, that was just part of the day...!" But then I looked at him pretty intently, saying. "The rest of the day we spent stopping a war. And what are you doing, young man...?"

I'm not a pacifist. I understand that there are times when war would seem the necessary action to the most deeply reflective, considered person. But what was so horrifying about tonight's program about Vietnam is that it showed President Johnson and Defense Secretary McNamara for what they were - just these guys talking on the phone, almost clueless about what was actually happening, certainly with a sense that something was horribly wrong but without the moral conviction to simply stop it. At one point, it was said that because McNamara had run Ford Motor Company, people figured he was the guy who could figure it all out. Really....?

And the worst part of all, of course, is that here we are again. I don't have any answers about Iraq, but I do know we need to be asking deeper questions....not just about what to do, but about who to be....as a country and even a species. None of this needed to happen in the Middle East. None of it. One bad decision, one selfish action, one imperialistic notion after another, led to all this. And no American, not one of us, should avoid the painful realization that yes, America does have blood on its hands. By the way -- not to change the subject or anything -- but can anyone tell me why the US Embassy in Iraq cost a billion dollars?

So we keep changing the places and changing the names, from Saigon to Baghdad to wherever is next. But we never seem to take responsibility for the part of the problem that might be us.

We continue to play war like a cheap high school drama; it'll all be okay if we just catch the bad guys. If anything, we're doing it now more than ever these days. The fact that they caught the "mastermind" of the Benghazi attack seems like such a cheap piece of theatre to me. The "mastermind"? As in, which one of them lit the match that then got thrown onto the gasoline? Are we kidding? Do we not recognize that if he hadn't, then someone else would have - if that not that night, then on some other night? And if not that embassy, then at some other? They weren't in Disneyland; they were in Libya! There will always be a Saigon, there will always be a Baghdad, and there will always be a Benghazi, until we desire the peace that lies beyond them so much that we are willing to do what is necessary to create a world at peace.

How do we do that? That's a much harder question. But at least it's the right one. And only when we're willing to withstand the discomfort of asking questions to which there are no easy answers, will we at last actually find some answers. The brave and mighty Americans we have lost at war did so much physical suffering for us; let us at the very least withstand the moral suffering of facing what needs to be faced, as painful as it is to face it, because only then will wisdom come.

]]>mwblog2014-06-19T21:43:14-08:00War, Iraq, Enlightenmenthttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/06/war_iraq_enligh.php
Sometimes, it's when all hope is seemingly lost that the greatest breakthroughs occur in life. Whatever forces us to recognize the limit to what we can do by ourselves, opens the mind to consider the possibility that there might be another way. When everything is all messed up, we've played all your cards, and we don't have a clue what to do now - that often becomes a magic moment. Commonly called "bottoming out," it's the point when we realize that our way isn't working - and then miraculously, things start working.

Nations can bottom out, just like individuals. And the situation in Iraq is just such a moment. You know the government is running out of cards to play when they're thinking maybe Iran can help. Or when the media's idea of great coverage is to call and ask the people who got us into Iraq for any great ideas they might have now that it's all exploded in our faces. To say we're grasping for straws is an understatement. Looking at the power of ISIL leads to horrifying possibilities that make the most varied sets of people, from the most disparate places and viewpoints, all ultimately come to the same conclusion: "We really, really have a problem here."

So what now?

From a spiritual perspective, the first thing we all do is to admit that the situation is not solvable by the mortal mind alone. That admission is both death to the ego and birth of the wiser self. It puts us into a different place of consciousness, a more humble attitude that doesn't make us dumber - it makes us smarter. It moves us beyond that small number of brain cells that we're currently using, taking the evolutionary leap that is the challenge of humanity at this moment - to realize that the human species will not survive unless we evolve beyond our material, mechanistic, Newtonian notion of how the universe operates. Our task is to embrace the primacy of consciousness as both the reality and the power that it is. There is more to the mind than the intellect, and the intellect alone can't solve every problem. This is not bad news, by the way; it's good.

Next, we move, en masse, into the level of consciousness that is the deeper Reality underlying all things, a self-organizing and self-correcting matrix of energy (some call it God, some do not) that is the natural intelligence of the universe. It is the mysterious guidance by which embryos become babies, acorns become oak trees and buds become blossoms. Our self-will only interferes with this intelligence; our lack of love obstructs it; prayer and meditation release it to work on our behalf.

As we can see from simply looking at a flower, nature knows how to organize itself. And this same force would organize human affairs if we would allow it to. This allowance occurs whenever we place our minds in correct alignment with the laws of the universe. Until we do this, we will continue to manifest a world that destroys rather than heals itself. Iraq is a perfect example.

Participating in the creation of collective field of prayer and meditation is something that each of us can do to help end the cycle of violence in the Middle East. Taking the mind to its natural state of alignment with the Truth at the center of things, these activities of the mind act like a magnet to attract the healing potential inherent in the universe. In the words of Martin Luther King, internal changes in the direction of non-violence are "materially passive but spiritually active." There are, in that field of collective meditative/prayerful consciousness, infinite possibilities that the conscious mind can simply not formulate.

What is the conceit that this time in history is calling us to surrender? It is the notion that the conscious, mortal, intellectual mind can be trusted to rule and organize all things. Given the state of affairs on the planet today, it is preposterous to think it can. As they would say in Alcoholics Anonymous, "Our best thinking got us here."

A study published in the Yale Journal of Conflict Resolution in l985 reported on a group of advanced meditators from the Transcendental Meditation Movement who meditated in Jerusalem in l983 during the height of the Lebanese Civil War. During the summer of 1983, on each day in which there were large numbers of meditators, violence dropped and stayed low for an additional day or so and then went back to its previous levels. The final data revealed that whenever the group of meditators assembled, there was an average of a 76% reduction in war deaths.

Why is this so?

Because on a level of subtle energy, often referred to as the Unified Field Theory, all minds are joined as one. In the words of Candace Badgett, founder of the Women's Institute at Maharishi University, "War is the result of the build up of stress and negativity in collective consciousness... And it's consequences are the suffering and resentment that in turn perpetuate retaliation in the form of terrorism, conflict .....and more war." Breaking this cycle of violence is now within the reach, and the power, of each of us. The more we all do our part to prepare the field, the more creative solutions will be available to world leaders seeking to effectuate external change.

Often in life, collectively and well as individually, we find ourselves confronted by more than problematic events; we find ourselves confronted by a resistant energetic force field that external change of itself does not fundamentally altar. And so it is with the scourge of war. War is not just an external event; it is a field of fear-based consciousness that needs to be addressed on internal as well as external levels. And that will take all of our efforts.

Here are five principles for spiritual activism:

l) Atone in your heart for your own warlike nature - any thoughts or behavior of judgment or attack -- and seek to change your life where necessary.

2) Spend at least five minutes a day in prayer or meditation, knowing you are part of a global field of consciousness at work on the inner planes to bring about world peace.

3) Seek to organize your own community of like-minded individuals to join you in prayer or meditation groups for world peace.

4) If it applies, atone with others for the behavior of your country if it has in the past, or is now, participating in unjust military activity.

Just as science is seen not as a separate category of life, but rather the material alphabet that explains all external phenomena, so is consciousness the science of the inner life. The field of consciousness today is what the scientific revolution was for to late 19th and early 20th century, representing a similar advent of a new frontier. The question today is not how to convince others that these things are true. Enough of us now know they are. The issue now is how to harness the energy and power of this new understanding, so we can get on with the urgent task of saving our world from the clutches of war and delivering it to fields of unending peace. Visiting these fields within ourselves, we automatically become the source providers of their emergence in the outer world.

The basic scenario we all know, of course. Saddam Hussein, admittedly a bad guy, was also a secularist who kept Al Qaeda and other Islamist fundamentalists out of his country, as well as Iran's dictatorship at bay. With our invasion of Iraq (see Charles Ferguson's extraordinary documentary, No End in Sight) -- to the tune of two trillion dollars, almost 5,000 American lives lost and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives lost - we paved the way for what is happening now. Terrorists too radical even for Al Qaeda have taken over the second largest city in Iraq and seem headed for Baghdad, while Iran is now more of a problem than when Saddam was acting as a buffer.

This entire scenario could have been predicted - in fact it was predicted-- by those arguing against the invasion of Iraq at the time. Such voices were easily marginalized, however, by mainstream media simply toeing the government line about weapons of mass destruction. Government PR lackeys posing as journalists underreported the anti-war effort, painting a picture of those who opposed the war as unsophisticated peaceniks, fuzzy-brained ragamuffin types who simply didn't understand the complicated analysis and profound, wise warnings being touted by the esteemed warmongers in business suits then running our affairs.

The warmongers spoke in well-modulated tones, drowning out the voices of those who were upset by the prospect of innocent people dying for no good reason. There were anti-war protests all over the country but little good they did when basically ignored by the media hacks who capitulated, no-real-questions-asked, to the Administration's Iraqi war plans. I remember Dennis Kucinich saying there would be hand-to-hand combat in Baghdad, and the elite just rolled their eyes. Like really, how ridiculous; did he not know we would be out of there within six weeks?

So here we are. As an Iraqi woman bitterly expressed to me on my radio show a few years ago, "When Saddam and his sons were alive, we knew we had three devils. But we were waiting for them to die, and planning what we would do then. Now, with what has happened, there are devils on every corner." I think about that woman now; the militants who have captured Mosul have declared Shariah law in that city, saying they will do so in every city they capture and shooting on sight anyone refusing to acquiesce.

President Obama and his foreign policy team will decide what to do now. Do we aid the Iraqis against the militants at this point? And if we do, in what way? What if Iraq falls to the fundamentalist insurgents? I don't envy anyone having to decide what to do with the mess we have on our hands now.

Nor do I claim to have any answers on a military level. But I know this: military issues are not the only level of the problem, and they're not the only level of the solution. Nothing the government does now - no action or non-action on its part - will change the fundamental trajectory of national tragedy - and I don't just mean Iraq's - if we, the American people, do not wake up to what has happened here. We have gone from a country that fought World War 2 with a sober understanding of the perils if not the necessities of war, to a country repeatedly prey to the militaristic prowess of a military-industrial-governmental complex we seem to have a hard time recognizing for what it is: often anything but patriotic and often anything but sane.

Like an emotionally addicted lover who will simply not admit that our partner is a narcissist with no capacity for empathy or concern for anyone's needs but their own, the American people have allowed ourselves to be played like a fiddle at the cost of blood and almost unimaginable suffering for hundreds of thousands of people.

This is not just a political problem; it is a psychological one. And until we solve that problem - until we take our house keys back from a sociopathic establishment -- we will continue the tragic dysfunction that has taken us from Vietnam to Iraq, now already evident in heady though blessedly distant drum rolls of the genuinely insane dingaling, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran."

The American people have been suckers for decades now, for serious-sounding men and women in business suits spouting nationalistic crap about the necessity of applying brute force in places where it is patently absurd to do so. That crowd of well-dressed liars sent young, brave but surely terrified Americans into an unnecessary and ill-conceived war in Iraq that they planned ten years prior to Bush even being in the White House, while they sipped champagne and kissed each other on the cheek at Washington cocktail parties. They lied about yellowcake uranium, they played Colin Powell like an unsuspecting puppy, and -- oh, did I mention this? -- they and their friends made millions and even billions of dollars by prosecuting that war. According to The Financial Times, Halliburton has earned $39.5 billion on the Iraq War so far.

If karma, or the Law of Cause and Effect, applies to nations as it applies to individuals - and it does - then God help us. And it is time to admit to ourselves the painful truth: that we allowed all this to happen. Too cowed, too busy, too unconcerned - whatever we were - we allowed it to happen in big ways and small, and every individual has to decide for him or herself what he or she might have done differently in the run up to this awful moment. One thing is for sure, however: we as a generation have allowed ourselves to be played. It's hard to admit this, but things will not fundamentally change until we do.

This problem will not be solved by merely changing the political guard in Washington; it will be solved by changing our hearts, waking up as citizens, and taking responsibility for the awful fact that none of this could have happened had we not been far too eager, time and time again, to look the other way while the voices of militarism, warmongering and economic imperialism - simply by manipulating media symbols and our emotions - had their way with us, turning a great nation into fools.

It happened in Vietnam. Now it has happened in Iraq. How many times will we allow people to die in wars that its planners later call, as Robert McNamara did the Vietnam war, "a terrible mistake"? There is, quite simply, too much blood on American hands. With a 650 billion dollar annual Defense budget and a military-industrial complex extracting from the pool of our national resources not only our money, but the blood of our young soldiers and our moral standing with God and the rest of humanity, this is just one more reason why it's time for the American people to take back our country, reclaim our democracy, and make right our conscience before it is too late.

The process of healing - whether in an individual's life or in a nation's life -- begins with a simple, humble atonement for our errors. We need to take ownership of the problem before we can take ownership of the solution, and the biggest problem is within ourselves. With a Presidential election coming up, it's extremely important that we stop being such easy marks for tough-on-national-security arguments that only use and abuse us. Sometimes, wisdom only comes when we've faced the horrible fact that we've behaved like fools.

In our foolishness, we acquiesced to nothing short of patterns of willful, unnecessary killing. For killing is what war is. And that is why it should never, ever happen for any other reason than the most radical necessity. Those who say this are not immature children; in fact, increasingly they're the only grownups in the room. A stupid, unnecessary war is not something to brag about; it's something for which to humbly ask God's forgiveness.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln in declaring a National Day of Fasting and Prayer on March 30, 1863, "...It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness. It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon..."

With events like those occurring in Iraq right now, we should realize that our window of time is starting to close. Lincoln's injunction that we should throw ourselves on the mercy of God might sound crazy to the warmongers, but it's time at last for them to sound crazy to us.

]]>mwblog2014-06-13T18:41:46-08:00Are You Serious?http://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2014/06/are_you_serious_5.php
I didn't place in the top two in last week's House of Representatives District 33 primary election, and while of course I was disappointed I was certainly not devastated or even truly sad.

But I've heard things in the aftermath of the election that indeed have made me sad - not because people didn't vote for me, but because of why in many cases people said they didn't vote for me. These issues relate not just to an election, but to an attitude that pervades our culture in relation to anyone with a so-called "spiritual" perspective.

First, I apparently wasn't perceived by some people as a "serious" candidate. Given the fact that I was the only candidate in the race with an entire platform based on child poverty, mass incarceration, income disparity, diminishing civil liberties, domestic surveillance, student loan debt, corporatization and rule by oligarchy, passing a Green New Deal, and a Constitutional Amendment to rid corporations of the rights of personhood, I'm a little stymied as to what makes a person "serious" enough to pass muster with the so-called "serious" people who make such judgments. Indeed, mine was the only top tier candidacy that actually did make a serious critique of the political status quo.

What, I wonder, makes one a "serious" candidate in the eyes of supposedly serious people, other than being someone who doesn't challenge their notions of what it means to be serious? When people capitulate to a system that they know is broken -- that they know in their hearts will not be fixed by mere legislative technique -- yet do not actually vote to change that system, then they're being intellectually and emotionally dishonest. And that is not a serious person.

Spirituality is not a religion; it is a conviction of the heart. And making a case for social conscience is not a joke. No one should apologize for the fact that they believe we're on the Earth to love each other, and if anything, those who do not factor that notion into their politics are the ones who should be apologizing. If love matters most, then it's intolerable that America has the second-highest child poverty rate among all advanced nations in the world, or the highest mass incarceration rate in the world, or a system that is rigged more and more every day in the interests of our richest citizens; if money matters most, then why concern ourselves?

"New Age" is a label that can be used to trivialize even the most serious thinker. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that "we have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of civilization." Should only clergy be allowed to say this, without risk of mockery? What makes one a New Age Guru, by the way, other than having been caricatured that way decades ago by the likes of People magazine? Most importantly, I'm left wondering how in the world one fights a caricature.

I will not take off my stilettos in order to cater to subconscious sexism, any more than I will stop proclaiming the power of faith in order to cater to a secularized progressive bias. Love doesn't need scientific verification. What I will do to the best of my ability is respond to such prejudices, by naming them and calling them out. I know my campaign was outside the box, but inside the box is profoundly toxic today. And no one living or working within that box has the right to say that they are serious thinkers, or that someone trying to destroy the box is not. A pseudo-progressive and pseudo-intellectual establishment that urges us to fight our new corporate overlords while functioning at the behest of those overlords is serious only in that it is seriously ridiculous. And nothing could be a more serious task today than to call our political system to account for its corruption, our society to the challenge of taking a serious look at our national character defects, and our country to its remembrance of our own democratic ideals at a time when they are withering away before our eyes.

]]>mwblog2014-06-12T17:01:36-08:00Prayer for Connecticuthttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2012/12/prayer_for_conn.php
For those who bear tonight the unbearable burden
of unimaginable grief,
who in their agony yell at the forces of fate...
For those who moan and those who faint,
for those who rage and those who pray,
we moan and pray along with you.
For now, those were our children too.
Dear God, May a legion of angels come upon these parents.
Bring to them an otherworldly touch,
an otherworldly comfort
an otherworldly sense that their children are well --
that they are safe with God,
and shall be with them always.
Give to those who grieve what no mortal can give...
the touch of Your Hand upon their heart.
May all touched by this darkness
be Lit by Your grace.
Please wipe away all tears, dear God.
as only You can do.
Amen ]]>mwblog2012-12-25T10:10:51-08:00Christmas for Mysticshttp://blog.marianne.com/journal/archives/2012/12/christmas_for_m.php
The holidays are only holy if we make them so.

Otherwise, the assault of modernity - from crass consumerism to a 24-hour news cycle to the compulsivity of the wired world - wrecks whatever we have left of our nervous systems, making the true spiritual meaning of Christmas seem as distant as the furthest star. It's only when we consciously carve out a space for the holy - in our heads, our hearts and our lifestyles - that the deeper mysteries of the season can reveal themselves.

The holidays are a time of spiritual preparation, if we allow them to be. We're preparing for the birth of our possible selves, the event with which we have been psychologically pregnant all our lives. And the labor doesn't happen in our fancy places; there is never "room in the Inn," or room in the intellect, for the birth of our authentic selves. That happens in the manger of our most humble places, with lots of angels, i.e. Thoughts of God, all around.

Something happens in that quiet place, where we're simply alone and listening to nothing but our hearts. It's not loneliness, that aloneness. It's rather the solitude of the soul, where we are grounded more deeply in our own internal depths. Then, having connected more deeply to God, we're able to connect more deeply with each other. Our connection to the divine unlocks our connection to the universe.

According to the mystical tradition, Christ is born into the world through each of us. As we open our hearts, he is born into the world. As we choose to forgive, he is born into the world. As we rise to the occasion, he is born into the world. As we make our hearts true conduits for love, and our minds true conduits for higher thoughts, then absolutely a divine birth takes place. Who we're capable of being emerges into the world, and weaknesses of the former self begin to fade. Thus are the spiritual mysteries of the universe, the constant process of dying to who we used to be as we actualize our divine potential.

We make moment-by-moment decisions what kind of people to be -- whether to be someone who blesses, or who blames; someone who obsesses about past and future, or who dwells fully in the present; someone who whines about problems, or who creates solutions. It's always our choice what attitudinal ground to stand on: the emotional quicksand of negative thinking, or the airstrip of spiritual flight.

Such choices are made in every moment, consciously or unconsciously, throughout the year. But this is the season when we consider the possibility that we could achieve a higher state of consciousness, not just sometimes but all the time. We consider that there has been one - and the mystical tradition says there have also been others - who so embodied his own divine spark that he is now as an elder brother to us, assigned the task of helping the rest of us do the same. According to A Course in Miracles, he doesn't have anything we don't have; he simply doesn't have anything else. He is in a state that is still potential in the rest of us. The image of Jesus has been so perverted, so twisted by institutions claiming to represent him. As it's stated in the Course, "Some bitter idols have been made of him who came only to be brother to the world." But beyond the mythmaking, doctrine and dogma, he is a magnificent spiritual force. And one doesn't have to be Christian to appreciate that fact, or to fall on our knees with praise and thanks at the realization of its meaning. Jesus gives to Christmas its spiritual intensity, hidden behind the ego's lure into all the wild and cacophonous sounds of the season. Beyond the nativity scenes, beyond the doctrinal hoopla, lies one important thing: the hope that we might yet become, while still on this earth, who we truly are.